Danny is the host of of Building Local Power, the official podcast of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and his reporting led to a new multi-episode season of BLP entited “The Data Centers Are Coming.” In this episode of the WSR pod, we talk to Danny about his reporting, and lessons he learned while traveling to the hear of America’s data center resistance.

“The whole world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people.” - James Baldwin

It’s been a cold spring in the northern plains of the Midwest, and the long stretch of rural highway between Fargo, North Dakota and Grygla, Minnesota is bathed in the beige of wilted grass, barren trees, and last year’s harvest. In the creek beds and roadside ditches, hints of new green grass erupt through the dry dirt, but only just. In the desolate cold, life persists.

The Grygla General Store sits on a side road just off of East State Street, the main thoroughfare in this town of around 180 residents. Folks here have shopped the shelves at the general store for more than a century. On first glance, the shop looks like a well-stocked convenience store; snacks and packaged pastries fill the end cap shelves that face the door. A roller grill turns hot dogs endlessly. Coolers full of single-serve drinks hum nearby. But just past the entrance, the general store slowly reveals its true self. Turn a corner, and there are the coolers of fresh meat and produce near the back. Another corner, and you’re suddenly inside a hardware store, where rows of bins hold fasteners, while others brim with seeds hungry for warmer weather. A wall of paint color samples peeks through another threshold and, just beyond, there’s a gift shop filled with bags of locally-roasted coffee and racks of t-shirts screenprinted nearby.

Cheyenne Irlbeck is showing us around. We’re touring the store as part of the Rural Grocery Summit, an annual gathering of small town grocers, suppliers, distributors, and rural food access advocates being held in Fargo this year. Irlbeck seems happy to host. She bought the general store a month after she graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2022. She never thought she’d own a grocery store. She comes from a farming family, and she thought she might end up selling agriculture insurance or some such. The farmer who sold her the store only bought it himself to keep it from being turned it into a parking lot. When he suggested to Irlbeck that she take over the store, Irlbeck ran with the idea. She made operating the Grygla General Store her senior year capstone project.

Running a do-it-all store in the smallest of small towns isn’t easy. The building is a century old, and some of the equipment in the store is starting to show its age. Last week, she had a pizza freezer go down. She’s got a new one on the way, but it’s not here yet. In the spring, when the winter snow that collects on the store’s roof melts, it can look like a swimming pool up there, she says. She’s trying to get a grant to add pitch to the roof to help the water drain, but nothing’s stuck yet.

There’s also a Walmart about 45 minutes away in Thief River Falls that she has to contend with. It’s in a town where lots of local folks work, so it’s convenient for people to shop there, too, and Irlbeck knows that. It’s part of the persistent economic conundrum of running a store in a small town without a big hub for jobs and industry. People commute, they go to the dentist, the come and go for lots of reasons. Sometimes, their money leaves with them and doesn’t come back.

Subscribe now

The population here is changing, too. High schoolers graduate and move on. At the moment, she has ten workers in her store. She’d like to have about 15 or so to make sure everything gets done, but the students she’d typically hire are off traveling for the summer this year, so more of the work falls to her. Other folks here in Grygla are getting on in age, and some struggle to make it out of the house, let alone to the Walmart miles away.

So Irlbeck does whatever she can to help. She doesn’t advertise it, but if people nearby need their groceries delivered because they can’t get out, she’ll do it. If there’s something she doesn’t carry, she’ll order it to the store and make sure it gets to them. It’s been the mission of the store since it first opened. It’s had different names, sometimes different merchandise — it sold shoes for a while. Irlbeck says that, regardless of the name or the format, the store has always revolved around the community, and vice versa. “We’re not making shoes any more,” she tells us. “But I can order some in for you if you need them.”

***

Erskine, Minnesota is about an hour’s drive south of Grygla. A quaint town of around 400, life here mainly revolves around farms and water. There are five lakes within a few miles of the store, including one right across the street, and people travel to the area to fish, hunt and boat — “cabin dwellers,” folks around here tend to say. The town’s logo is a happy-looking northern pike, and every May, people flock to the annual Erskine Water Carnival, where classic cars and tractors gleam in the streets and fireworks ignite the night sky above Lake Cameron.

Jason Beckett runs Groceries Plus in Erskine, a full service grocery store in the town’s main commercial district. The store is compact and straightforward. The few aisles host all of your staples — breads, cereals, cans of soup and veggies, chips and snacks. End cap displays feature this and that. One display offers shoppers sunglasses and antifreeze, Crocs and chemical toe warmers. Business here transforms with the seasons. Lots of tourists walk through the doors of Groceries Plus in the summer. The winters are tough, but the summers can make up for it.

Things have changed here in Erskine. Back in the 1970s and 80s, four grocery stores and a butcher shop served the town and its visitors. But there were lots more farms nearby back then. After years of consolidation, today two big farms encircle Erskine; the need for more grocers left along with those farmers and workers. There are still smaller farmers nearby; kids still show up in the summertime to sell sweet corn in front of the store. But there aren’t as many small farms as there used to be. Beckett and Groceries Plus is the only full-service grocer left in town.

Beckett says that, a few years back, he had big plans for the store. They were working to expand into the defunct laundromat next door. Then, six years ago, a Dollar General opened two blocks away. The dollar store doesn’t offer the fresh meat and produce Beckett does. Like most chain dollar stores, Dollar General sells little besides processed, shelf-stable foods. Still, the store’s opening rocked business at Groceries Plus. Sales fell 46 percent the first year. Things have stabilized since then, but it’s not the same. “Dollar General really killed us,” Beckett says.

Just like the nearby Walmart, the chain dollar stores have built their businesses on systemic unfairness. They use their size and power not only to get better prices from suppliers, but to coax suppliers into charging more to stores like Beckett’s and their wholesalers — either explicitly or tacitly. It’s not legal, but the ban on that kind of discrimination has been rarely enforced over the past half-century, so the chain stores get away with it. Today, the Dollar General in Erskine sells a case of soda to customers for less than what Groceries Plus pays its distributor for the same case. It sucks, and it isn’t fair, but right now it’s reality for so many rural grocers.

Beckett still has a job to do, and the store still has a community to serve. Like other small grocers, Beckett keeps shoppers coming back with service. He does pretty much whatever his customers ask, because he know stores like Dollar General won’t. He delivers groceries through The Dancing Sky Area Agency on Aging, a regional program that aims to help older folks stay in their homes. He drives groceries to 22 people in six surrounding counties, about a hundred miles worth of driving all in all. It’s part of what ties rural grocers to their towns: service to customers instead of shareholders.

Beckett has done it all in his 15 years at Groceries Plus, and he’ll probably do it again. “I’ve taken people to get their hair done,” he quips to the tour group. “You can’t say no.”

Share

For the first time in decades, there’s real support for stopping the kind of backroom deals Walmart and the dollar stores force on their suppliers — the kind that so often force small grocers out of business and leave communities without the crucial services grocers like Beckett and Irlbeck provide. Elected officials want the deals stopped. Lawsuits are winding their way through the courts. State lawmakers are looking for ways to end those sweetheart deals within their borders — including in Minnesota, where a new, proposed law would bring rural grocers and their wholesalers some relief. There’s still a long way to go, but people nationwide, from all walks of life and political persuasions, are fighting for fairness for the first time in a long time.

The drive back towards the North Dakota border winds through the White Earth Indian Reservation, spread across three counties in the northwest of the state. Community members here harvest and process wild rice by hand, some of which is cleaned and sold at Native Harvest, a shop in Callaway, Minnesota, that shares a building with the local tribal radio station. The rice looks like some distant relative of the bleached, compact grains you see at most stores — its long, slender grains, all in shades of tan and black, seem to teem with vital stuff. The rice looks like it, and it alone, could sustain a community.

Back across the North Dakota border, the vast, flat prairie under the impossibly wide sky offers glimmers of life renewed. The branches of a few trees are bursting with flowers that will clear the way for fresh green leaves. The pockets of prairie trees here appear fuller, denser, with buds swelling in the cool air. Spring is coming — and with it, hope.

Independent music fans rejoice: After three hours of public comments and literally months of public debate, the Portland, Maine City Council last night voted in favor of land use changes that will effectively kill a plan to build a 3,300 seat Live Nation venue in the city.

The vote is a major win for independent venues that, for years, have been victimized by Live Nation’s domination of the live music industry. When Live Nation comes to town, it tilts an entire concert ecosystem in its favor, shutting out indie venues that serve as crucial hubs for fans and a home for emerging bands and musicians. The folks at the Maine Music Alliance — a coalition of artists, promoters, and independent venue owners — immediately understood the threat a Live Nation venue would pose for the vibrant Portland music scene, and stepped up to fight it at City Hall, leading to the council’s monumental vote yesterday.

By a 5-4 vote, the council approved an ordinance that would bar any new 1,000-seat music venue from opening within 750 feet of an existing venue in the city. Since the proposed Live Nation venue was planned to open across the street from the existing Merrill Auditorium, the ordinance quashes Live Nation’s plan to build there. There’s still a chance Live Nation will try to fight the ordinance, and it might look for another location to build in the city. Monopolists don’t give up easily. But at least for now, the good guys won.

Share

The Maine Music Alliance and others fighting Live Nation’s invasion of Portland suddenly had a major legal ruling on their side. Earlier this month, a federal jury found that Live Nation had used its power to illegally monopolize major parts of the live music industry. Since Live Nation’s plan to move to Portland first surfaced, venue owners, musicians, and fans have been sounding the alarm about the company’s monopoly and the harm it inflicts on everyone else in the live music world when it comes to town. Now there’s a major jury verdict to back up those claims.

Council chambers overflowed with speakers and residents last night opposing the Live Nation venue. One speaker, who identified themself as Jules, a “born-and-raised Portlander,” said off hand that they were not speaking “on behalf of any corporation or criminal enterprise” and that “personally I have never been found guilty of a crime by a jury” — a nod to Live Nation’s newly official monopoly status.

“I’m here just to be counted as a drop in the bucket of Portlanders who choose local flavor over corporate slop,” Jules told the council. By the time all of those drops in the bucket were counted, Portland had killed Live Nation’s invasion plans, for now.

We’ve covered Portland’s resistance to Live Nation in the past; If you want to catch up on the story, you can read more here.

I’m a little late getting to the major news on Tuesday this week that a federal jury found Live Nation liable for illegally monopolizing parts of the live music ticketing and promotion industry. It was an explosive, landmark ruling, in which every juror found Live Nation liable on every count it was charged with. Ticketmaster sucks, Live Nation makes the entire live music ecosystem less competitive and less accessible for fans, venues, and artists, and it finally got its comeuppance. The jury’s decision validated years of hard work and diligent advocacy by pro-competition advocates to see the company face illegal monopoly charges in court. It’s a major win in the long arch of antimonopoly in America. Everyone who fights against corporate control of our economy and our lives should celebrate.

I wrote a big piece in The Sling, a great publication that covers antitrust and monopoly issues, where I explained the importance and historical relevance of state attorneys general stepping up and trying the Live Nation case to victory. They did a hell of a job, and were imminently wise to hire courtroom superstar Jeff Kessler to lead the prosecution. At times in antimonopoly history in America, states have led the way, and they are clearly in a position to lead today. They need more money, and better state laws, but state enforcers made clear they’re ready and willing to take on monopolies and bad mergers. Read more about that in The Sling.

Share

But the Live Nation trial process is not over yet. The jury found that Live Nation is an illegal monopoly, but the New York federal judge overseeing the case, Arun Subramanian, will now decide what to do about it. The states have asked for break up by at least forcing Live Nation to sell off Ticketmaster, but possibly more. Is that likely to happen — and is it necessary to fix Live Nation’s monopoly abuses? That’s the question that will drive the next portion of this trial and will decide whether music fans, independent venues, and musicians get the relief they deserve, or whether Live Nation will continue ripping off and abusing everyone else in live music.

The decision Subramanian faces seems simple. The jury found that Live Nation had abused its monopoly in ticketing, concert ticketing, and in promoting concerts at big venues around the country. Live Nation relied on the anticompetitive structure of its business, with opportunities for self-preferencing and foreclosure at every turn, to shut out rivals, bully venue owners, and overcharge fans. Were Live Nation not the country’s largest ticketing company, concert promoter, artist manager, and the second-largest venue owner and operator, none of its illegal behavior would be possible. The solution, then, is right in front of our eyes. Break the company up, separate its lines of business, and let each one compete on its own merits.

Subramanian could go another route. He could instead try to fix Live Nation’s monopoly abuse by ordering the company to behave. These kinds of antitrust fixes, called “behavioral remedies” by the antitrust lawyers, have been favored by the pro-bigness crowd as a way to theoretically fix monopoly problems without getting rid of the monopoly itself. Unsurprisingly, they almost never work. They’re expensive and time consuming for courts to administer, they go against the very nature of a profit-maximizing monopoly, and, in Live Nation’s case, have been proven deeply ineffective in the past. When Live Nation was caught abusing its monopoly power back in 2019, the government then chose to ask a court to make Live Nation behave, rather than sue to break the company up. According to testimony at trial, Live Nation was back to its old ways a year later, bullying the owner of the Barclays Center into using Ticketmaster in order to host Live Nation tours and artists. Behavioral remedies are generally bullshit, but in Live Nation’s case, they’re not even a realistic option. As George W Bush famously said: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me…you can’t get fooled again.”

But stranger things have happened, unfortunately. A different federal judge found that Google had illegally monopolized online search after trial, then decided that no kind of breakup or divestiture was needed to fix the problem. So there’s always a risk that something funny will happen. But again, Live Nation isn’t Google; it’s monopoly abuse happens purely because of the company’s anticompetitive structure, and breakup is an obvious and immediate fix.

There’s a long time to go before any final decision happens. Live Nation says they’ll appeal, and those appeals will take time to work out in courts. Then there’s the remedies phase, and possible appeals from that. It’s a long road. But we’re off to a great start.

I’ll have lots more on the Live Nation decision soon, including a killer podcast my colleague Danny Caine and I recorded when the decision dropped. As always, we’ll keep you posted.

When my colleagues and I talk about massive, hyperscale data centers, we use a kind of shorthand to capture the national feeling around extractive AI factories: Everyone hates data centers.

This week, voters confirmed that sentiment pretty much anywhere data centers or their backers were on the ballot.

Let’s start in my neck of the woods, in Festus, Missouri, a Mississippi River town just south of St. Louis. Last week, the eight-member Festus city council sat at a table at one end of the Festus High School gymnasium to hear public comment and vote on an ordinance that would permit a new $6 billion data center in town. The data center plan was massively unpopular among residents, who filled the rafters of the gym and, one by one, walked to the lectern at center court to berate the plan, and the council, for even considering it (until the mayor of Festus, Sam Richards, cut off speakers two hours into the meeting). In a scene both remarkable and predictable, Festus residents booed, jeered, and chanted “vote them out” as the council voted to approve the ordinance, 6-2.

Well, as the saying goes: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Four members of the council who supported the data center were up for reelection on Tuesday, and every member lost by margins that don’t do justice to the word, “landslide.” Council member Bobby Venz barely won 17 percent of the vote in his race. Seventeen! Jim Tinnin, who also voted for the data center ordinance, failed to get 20 percent of the votes in his race. All four newly-elected council members ran on platforms of government transparency and against data centers, and they all won handily. In Festus — as with the rest of the country — elected officials only get to support data centers once.

A few hundred miles north, in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin suburb of Port Washington, residents have been grappling with a massive, $15 billion data center project intended to host OpenAI servers as part of the Trump-backed, nation-wide “Stargate” data center roll out. Folks in Port Washington didn’t want it, and certainly didn’t want it if it meant the city was going to give away millions in tax revenue to help some of the wealthiest companies on earth build it. Data centers have flocked to the southeast corner of Wisconsin, surely attracted by easy access to the copious amounts of fresh water required to run the AI factories. So through a voter-led, citywide ordinance, residents offered up an ultimatum: If Big Tech wants to build data centers here, they — and not taxpayers — will have to pay for it.

Share

The ordinance, which would let voters approve or deny tax incentives for any project worth more than $10 million, went before voters on Tuesday and passed by about a 2-to-1 margin. Christine Le Jeune, who leads the grassroots group Great Lakes Neighbors United, told Politico on Tuesday that the vote sets a precedent for data center fights around the country. “This is something that other communities can look to,” she said.

These fights are just the start. Voters in three other towns will take up similar ordinances later this year, while Ohio residents are working to get a state-wide data center moratorium on the ballot in November. And that feels like just the tip of a much larger anti-data center iceberg that is emerging as one of, if not the driving force in local politics. Residents in Williamstown, New Jersey recently berated their city council members over their data center support (and the council’s apparent annoyance at their constituents’ concerns). Nationwide, half of all planned data centers have been delayed or cancelled, almost entirely due to the organized opposition of local groups. The national rejection of data centers is more bipartisan than any other issue in American politics. National left-leaning democrats Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are pushing a nationwide data center moritorium, while Ohio Lt. Governor candidate Kim Georgeton, a republican and self-proclaimed “constitutional conservative,” has made opposing data centers a key plank in her platform for office. Again: Everyone hates data centers.

A good portion of this visceral, near-universal reaction to data centers and AI is indeed a kind of NIMBYism, what I would call monopoly NIMBYism. Data centers are bad neighbors. Their excessive energy use drives up electricity bills. They are impossibly thirsty, requiring millions of gallons of fresh water to operate. They’re noisy. They pollute the air and water. Not wanting the worst possible neighbor to move in next door is an imminently reasonable position for people to take. But the data center uprising isn’t just about the physical thing. People’s apprehension of data centers mirrors our collective apprehension of AI, and of big tech in general. One of AI proponents’ main selling points is that AI is going to render some kinds of jobs unnecessary — a frightening prospect for many service workers, particularly in Rust Belt communities where good paying, union factory jobs left decades ago. Aside from a few hundred construction jobs during buildout, AI data centers don’t create jobs; they take them. The data center problem smacks of broader pattern of big tech monopolies making local residents’ lives worse — how Google’s advertising monopoly has decimated local newspapers, and how Amazon has tried to kill off whatever local brick-and-mortar retailers Walmart didn’t destroy over the past 30 years. People are fighting Amazon warehouses and dollar stores in the same ways and for the same reasons they fight data centers: No one wants an extractive monopoly outpost in their back yard. And when voters get the chance to go to the polls to show their opposition, they do it.

Unless you’re a Taco Bell devotee or a Chipotle stan, your favorite local restaurant is probably an independent one. From small town diners to French bistros, indie restaurants are the backbones of our neighborhood centers — especially now, when so many traditional brick-and-mortar shops have been forced out by small business killers Amazon and Walmart. Here in Kansas City, where I live, local restaurants are place-makers in all of the city’s most vibrant neighborhoods, helping fill retail storefronts and creating foot traffic that boost the fortunes other local shops and bars.

Independent restaurants often source the food they serve differently than chain restaurants and fast casual spots. For some restaurants and food trucks, farmers’ markets, specialty bakers, local dairies and local butchers help fill the menus. For the rest of the things restaurants need to operate — freezer staples, fryer oil, towels, aprons, herbs and spices and so on — most indie restaurants today have a choice.

Some local restaurants buy their supplies from the same major product distributors that the chains use. Sysco is the largest wholesale restaurant supply distributor in the country, selling everything from meat and vegetables, to sugar packets, to glasses and cups, to kitchen cleaning supplies. It’s a one-stop shop that often comes with high minimum purchases, delivery windows, and pushy sales reps.

More often, independent chefs and restaurateurs get their supplies from their local Jetro Restaurant Depot warehouse, where the shelves are stocked to the ceiling with everything a mom-and-pop restaurant or a food truck owner needs to make it through the coming lunch or dinner rush. It’s a cash-and-carry business that sells goods in smaller amounts, which dovetails with the needs and cashflow of a one-off, independent restaurant or food truck. There’s no sales rep, no mandatory minimum purchases. Restaurant Depot’s prices are reasonable, in part because they compete on price with the Syscos of the world. In the restaurant ecosystem, Restaurant Depot provides a critical alternative for small, independent gastropubs, diners and other eateries.

Share

That choice might be coming to an end. Last week, Sysco announced it planned to buy Restaurant Depot for a hefty $29 billion. The deal would give market leader Sysco full control of Restaurant Depot’s 166 warehouses and its many thousands of independent restaurant customers. Were the deal to close, all of those things that indie restaurants love about Restaurant Depot — the selection, the cash-and-carry convenience, and the competitive prices — would be under grave threat.

Now, the Federal Trade Commission will decide whether or not to challenge the deal over antitrust concerns. As bad as the merger would be for small restaurants, I don’t know that there’s a realistic chance the Federal Trade Commission, left to its own devices, will step in to stop it. For one thing, this particular FTC doesn’t seem to care much about its core job of stopping monopolies and bad mergers. But even if this FTC were awake and active, Sysco and Restaurant Depot don’t appear to compete in the exact same market — at least not in the technical antitrust sense. Sysco by in large serves larger restaurant chains, while Restaurant Depot serves the little guys. Yes, they both sell the same kinds of things, but to slightly different buyers.

Sysco is certainly optimistic the FTC will see things that way. “The facts of the case are it is a ​different channel, the primary customer is different, ​and there are synergies on ⁠how we can bring value to the end consumer,” Sysco CEO Kevin Hourican told Reuters.

Not challenging the deal would mean the FTC has again defaulted to the same short-sighted thinking that has plagued the agency for years and contributed to our monopolized economy. It’s why enforcers didn’t see a problem when Google wanted to buy DoubleClick, which cemented Google’s digital advertising monopoly. It’s how Amazon was able to purchase Whole Foods with virtually no pushback whatsoever. Unless a merger includes two companies that sell or buy the exact same things, the feds have generally fumbled around and not known what to do with it. It’s one reason why our economy is now just five corporations in a trench coat: Conglomerates buy up everything around them and the antitrust cops just shrug.

Ask most independent restaurant owners and chefs, and they’ll tell you that Sysco and Restaurant Depot serve as crucial counter-balances to one another, and the fact that they both exist and offer similar products is what keeps the industry honest. That’s why those exact restaurants have become the loudest voice to oppose the deal, and to try to get the FTC to take action.

The Independent Restaurant Coalition has long been an active voice in policy matters that impact local restaurants. They fight against credit card monopolies and their sky-high fees, and have pushed back against predatory third-party delivery apps. They also advocate for policies that make restaurant workers’ lives easier, like affordable child care and more pathways to legal work status for immigrants.

So it’s no surprise the coalition has jumped to the front lines in the fight against the Sysco/Restaurant Depot deal. Erika Polmar, the group’s executive director, says the deal will kill important competition by putting both systems restaurants use for securing food and kitchen staples into the hands of a single company.

“When Sysco owns both the delivery truck and the warehouse, there’s no more checking one against the other. No more leverage. No more somewhere else to go,” Polmar says in a statement.

Polmar and the coalition will push the FTC to stop this deal, although its unclear whether this two-commissioner, Republican-only FTC will listen. The FTC should listen, and they should care. Independent restaurants are crucial to all kinds of communities in all kinds of places, urban, suburban and rural. Any lost price competition between Sysco and Restaurant Depot will lead to higher costs for restaurants — and higher bills for diners. The country’s spiraling crisis of affordability should be a bipartisan issue and one the FTC leads on. We’ll see what happens.

Polmar is also calling on coalition members to demand Congress take action. Congress can’t do much to block a deal on its own, but it can hold hearings and call executives to testify. Lawmakers have so far been quiet on the deal, but with the coalition’s campaign ramping up, that may change. As always, we’ll keep you posted.

Then Live Nation’s post-settlement shitstorm began, both within and outside of Judge Arun Subramanian’s New York City courtroom. That’s been very fun for us. Let’s recap!

1. Trump’s settlement with Live Nation has been just as unpopular as Ticketmaster. Pretty much anyone could have seen this coming. When the cabal of corporate MAGA lobbyists succeeded in pushing out ineffective but credible Justice Department antitrust chief Gail Slater, the fate of the federal Live Nation lawsuit was written on the wall. Still, the reaction to the toothless settlement has been visceral — including from longtime Trump allies in the MAGA world. Kid Rock, who has tied his brand to Trump more than any other major musician in America, lashed out at the settlement. In an interview with Noah Shachtman in the New York Times, Kid Rock expressed the kind of confusion only a true Trump believer could, given the very public MAGA lobbyist takeover of antitrust at the DOJ: “I don’t understand why they would negotiate a settlement,” Rock said. “Why not just let it see its course? Let’s see what 12 people decide.” As part of the settlement, Live Nation set aside nearly $300 million to pay the states to drop their part of the lawsuit, but only seven states took the bait; a bunch of Republican AGs from red states, including Kansas, Indiana, Florida, Texas, and others, all committed to letting the jury decide the fate of the Live Nation monopoly. Speaking of which…

   

2. Trump let Live Nation off the hook. The states doubled down. Lord knows what Live Nation and the Trump administration thought was going to happen in the wake of their comically weak settlement, but it probably didn’t include the states hiring one of the best antitrust lawyers in the world to carry on the case. Once the settlement dust had, er, settled, the 30-plus states who remained had hired Jeffrey Kessler, a top partner at Chicago law firm Winston & Strawn, to lead their prosecution. Kessler has earned a reputation as a winner in the antitrust world; he helped Michael Jordan win a major antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR earlier this year, and led college athletes to victory in their antitrust action against the NCAA. In my decade-plus reporting on antitrust and monopoly issues, Kessler’s reputation as a trial demon and consistent winner were widely known. He’s the last person Live Nation wanted to see in court — but Kessler is the company’s reward for all of the nasty tactics it used to get the feds to drop their case. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Speaking of nasty tactics…

3. Live Nation and Trump’s corruption is on full display. The lobbyist-led settlement of the feds’ Live Nation lawsuit is admittedly a worse look for Trump than it is for Live Nation, which everyone knows will do everything in its power to keep its monopoly intact. But holy hell is it a bad look! If there was ever any doubt that Ticketmaster was the most hated company in America, this settlement ended that debate. “Gotta say, there is nothing Ticketmaster does better than make a mockery of American laws,” journalist Moe Tkacik wrote on X after the news of the chaotic settlement dropped. The brazen and outwardly suspicious settlement process certainly got the attention of Subramanian, who learned of the deal in open court days after it was struck. In an order, the judge reminded all parties involved to save their settlement-related emails, texts and other messages, to make sure any settlement shenanigans are adequately captured. Subramanian could, hypothetically, do the absolute funniest thing possible and reject the settlement. Probably not, but we’ll see! Meanwhile…

4. The trial is going so, so badly for Live Nation. None of this week’s other very bad events would matter much to Live Nation if things seemed to be going the company’s way at trial. But things are certainly not going its way! Every trial exhibit that’s been introduced, every witness interview, has somehow been worse than the last for Live Nation. First, a bunch of Slack messages revealed at trial showed two Live Nation ticketing employees cackling online about their power to “gouge” the company’s customers, who are also “so stupid” to pay the LITERAL MONOPOLY to go see artists and concerts they care about. What monopoly, Live Nation asks? Well, maybe the one that dominates every aspect of live music, including amphitheater concerts, as the company brags about in internal documents. Or is it the company described in one article as an “unregulated monopoly,” which Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino called a “very smart assessment.”

   

   Speaking of Rapino, he’s on the stand today getting grilled by Kessler over all of this evidence and more. (Matthew Russell Lee from Inner City Press is providing the blanket coverage of the trial.)

Anyway, ha ha, what a shitshow it’s been for Live Nation and Ticketmaster so far. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer company. We’ll keep you posted.

Hello gang. This morning, more than 30 state attorneys general took the reigns in the monopolization trial against Live Nation and Ticketmaster. The trial’s restart is the culmination of one of the wildest weeks of antitrust law in recent memory, featuring more drama, plot twists and political corruption than a prime-time cop procedural. Now, despite the Trump administration’s best efforts, the break up of the most powerful and hated company in live music is back on the table, and in the hands of a jury. We’ll keep you posted when big trial news breaks.

Few folks understand the abusive power of Live Nation like Tommy Dorfman. Tommy’s story has been making the rounds this week — Live Nation and Ticketmaster allegedly used their dominance of the concert industry to bury Dorfman’s once-flourishing concert promotion business (he’s now a door-to-door salesman). I talked with Dorfman back in October 2025 about his 15-year fight against the Live Nation monopoly, but the time never felt quite right to post our interview.

Well, the time is certainly right to publish an interview with a front-line warrior against one of the most pernicious monopolies of the 21st Century. Here’s my conversation with Dorfman from October, which is even more pertinent today.

* This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Share

————

RK: Tommy, it’s great to be here with you. Why don’t you tell folks who you are and what you do?

TD: Yeah, absolutely. And thanks a lot for speaking with me. So, you know, I was a nightclub and live music promoter for over 15 years, and I built a pretty big club promotion business. Back in 2011, I had a major contract at the Meadowlands—the home of the New York Jets and Giants—and I was about to put on the biggest EDM festival of my career.

And since then, I’ve been battling Live Nation. According to my lawsuit, they wiped me out of that contract, and I intend to prove at trial that their actions ruined my career. I’ve been fighting them in federal court now for about 15 years.

RK: Why don’t you give folks a quick overview of what happened? What’s in the lawsuit, and where things stand with the litigation?

TD: Yeah, sure. Look, there’s been a lot over the past 15 years. But to start: I was a promoter—really a house music promoter—before EDM was even considered cool. I ran events at major clubs throughout New York and New Jersey.

Eventually I kind of plateaued, you know? And I wanted to get bigger. I opened some nightclubs, including one with what was considered the number one sound system in the world. But I realized that if I wanted to grow beyond that level, the industry I needed to be in was festivals.

Because I saw house music—which eventually became EDM—was about to go mainstream. I really believed it was going to be like when rock and roll went mainstream.

So I made a deal with the State Fair Meadowlands, which is at the stadium complex where the Jets and Giants play. It was a 10-year contract. The fair had over 500,000 attendees over four weeks, and I had the exclusive right to produce concerts and events there. My startup event was going to be an EDM festival.

That was my passion—that’s where I came from, the house music scene. And everything was going great. We had staging set up, we had great partners involved, we had marketing in place. The artists were excited. We were literally at the point where we were about to start booking flights.

And then Live Nation found out about it and, according to my lawsuit, came in and wiped it out. At the time, honestly, I didn’t even really know who Live Nation was, because they were doing rock shows. They weren’t really in EDM yet.

RK: Right, right. What were your interactions like with folks from Live Nation when all this was going on?

TD: Yeah, so according to my allegations, it was kind of a multi-pronged attack.

The first thing that happened was through the State Fair Meadowlands. The owner told me that Live Nation had met with him and said they were going to block my talent. For example, they allegedly told him that if DJ Tiësto [a Dutch DJ known as the godfather of EDM] played my show, they would block him worldwide.

They also said they would block artists from William Morris Agency, which at the time was one of the largest talent agencies in the world—especially in the EDM space. And they said they were going to get me kicked out through the New Jersey Sports Authority and block my ticketing.

So that’s how I first heard about it. And honestly, I was shocked, because I had never dealt with Live Nation before.

Subscribe now

RK: When did you really understand the pressure being exerted on you and decide, “Okay, I’ve got to take legal action”?

TD: Yeah, well, that was just the start.

At one point I was asked to go into Live Nation’s headquarters and meet with their top executives. In that meeting were Jason Miller, who was president of Live Nation New York City, and John D’Esposito, who was their vice president of talent.

According to my claims, they told me they were going to block my talent, block my ticketing, and essentially block the entire event if I didn’t partner with them and remove my partners from the deal. They said if I did that, they would fund the event.

Now, I had a handshake deal with my partners. Technically I could have done it, but I don’t break my word. So I refused.

According to my lawsuit, they tortiously interfered with my contract, defamed me, and pressured the Meadowlands Sports Authority, the State Fair owner, my partners, and the talent agencies. In the end, I lost my festival and my career.

I mean, just weeks before that, I was at the top of the scene—drinking champagne with people like Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton, booking artists with one phone call. Then suddenly I lost everything. I went homeless and ended up going door-to-door selling cable just to survive.

That’s when I decided to file the lawsuit. At that point I had recordings of conversations with executives, and I thought, you know, once this came out they would apologize and make things right. But that’s not what happened. Those executives were actually promoted.

RK: When did the full structure and power of Live Nation become clear to you?

TD: Honestly, the moment it really hit me was during that meeting with their executives.

Jason Miller told me that if I didn’t partner with them, he was going to block my tickets from Ticketmaster. And I said, “That doesn’t make sense—I’ve done business with Ticketmaster before.”

And he said, “We own Ticketmaster.”

At first I thought he was bluffing. But when I walked out of the meeting, I Googled it and saw that Live Nation had merged with Ticketmaster. That’s when it really hit me how much power they had, and I realized I was in serious trouble.

RK: You’ve been fighting this for 14 or 15 years now. What’s that been like?

TD: Yeah, look, I have a really good lawyer, Andrew Smith. But it’s basically just him. One attorney.

Live Nation’s law firm has thousands of lawyers and paralegals, and the company itself has tens of billions of dollars. So, yeah—it’s frustrating.

We have a lot of evidence, but much of it has never even been discussed in court. Early in the case, a federal magistrate judge ordered Live Nation to turn over discovery within 30 days. Years went by and we only got about five percent of it.

Eventually we just ran out of money to keep fighting over discovery. From my perspective, they delay, they pressure, they confuse. They make technical arguments—sometimes it feels like arguing that the Tooth Fairy isn’t real.

I have a lot of respect for the courts, but when one side has that much power and money, it makes it extremely difficult.

RK: Do you have a trial date yet?

TD: We did. Last year—I believe it was March 5—we had a firm trial date, and I was really excited to finally get my day in court.

At the last minute Live Nation asked for another mediation. Over 15 years we’ve probably had 15 or 20 mediations. The court agreed to it.

More recently, hearings in the case were moved again, and arguments are now scheduled for November 18.

[Update: Dorfman says that during that hearing, his attorney, for the first time during this case, accused Live Nation of operating a criminal enterprise. The transcript has not been released publicly.]

RK: You could have walked away from this years ago. What keeps you going?

TD: That’s a great question.

At the beginning it was an economic dispute. I wanted my money back, my festival back, my career back.

But over time, as I saw more documents and information, it became bigger than that. I believe Live Nation’s system harms artists, venues, and especially fans.

Ticket prices keep going up, and I allege that’s partly due to an illegal rebate scheme. If that scheme disappeared, I believe ticket prices could drop 30 to 40 percent immediately.

Over the years I’ve come to feel like I have a moral obligation to keep fighting—not just for myself but for the music scene I loved. Independent promoters have mostly disappeared. Artist development has suffered. The whole industry has become centralized.

I have kids now, and honestly, if they told me they wanted to work in the entertainment industry, I’d probably tell them to choose another path.

RK: The Justice Department has filed a major antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation. Do you think it could change things?

TD: I was really happy to see that lawsuit happen. What’s interesting is that opposition to the Live Nation–Ticketmaster merger has always been bipartisan.

When the merger happened, even Congressman Bill Pascrell said publicly that approving it had been a mistake.

So I support the case, regardless of which administration is pursuing it. Personally, I believe the company should be broken up—maybe even into several pieces—so independent promoters and venues can thrive again and fans can get lower prices.

RK: What advice would you give communities pushing back against Live Nation expansion?

TD: Honestly? For promoters, I’d say this: don’t fight Live Nation unless you’re prepared for what happened to me.

Because fighting them can mean losing your career and spending years in court. I don’t blame artists for staying quiet either. Look at what happened when Pearl Jam challenged Ticketmaster in the ’90s—they struggled to get shows booked.

But fans do have power. People can speak to their mayors, their legislators, their members of Congress. They can push the Department of Justice and the FTC.

Live Nation spends a lot on lobbying, but voters still have influence. If fans want lower ticket prices and a healthier music scene, political pressure is where change can happen.

RK: Tommy, this has been great. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me.

TD: Thank you. I appreciate it.

I wanted to be optimistic, I really did. Yes, we all knew that antitrust enforcement under the Trump Administration had regressed to George W. Bush-levels of ineptitude and weakness. We knew that Andrew Ferguson, FTC chair and consummate ass kisser, is willing to transform his agency into a culture war-waging laughing stock if it means a chance of Trump appointing him to the federal bench. The Justice Department, meanwhile, has allowed a bunch of awful corporate mergers to happen, while its trustbusting program has all but disappeared. And we know that a cabal of corporate lobbyists forced out former DOJ antitrust boss Gail Slater — deciding, apparently, that even an ineffective antitrust enforcer was more than the oligarchy would tolerate. Now, the lobbyists appear to be fully in charge at the Justice Department, and they’ve been angling for a Live Nation settlement for months. We knew all of this. But still. I thought Ticketmaster might be different.

After all, Ticketmaster is one of the most widely despised companies on the planet. Fans hate the company with a passion. So do many artists. Independent music venues have been fighting against the ticketing monopoly and its parent company, Live Nation, since forever. Republicans and Democrats alike think the company sucks. When the Biden administration sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster, and the case survived Trump administration chaos and MAGA lobbyists all the way to trial, I thought: This is it. For the first time in a half-century, antitrust is going to break up a company that badly deserves to be broken up.

Share

Welp. As the saying goes, when someone shows you who they are, believe them. A cowardly antitrust enforcer did the cowardly thing yesterday and settled the Live Nation lawsuit, just a week into trial. What Live Nation needs is a breakup, but what it got from the feds instead was an administrative slap on the wrist. I’m not going to dignify the settlement terms with a deep dive here, but suffice to say they make some superficial changes to how Live Nation does business while leaving the extremely anticompetitive structure of the company intact. Live Nation lawyers, executives and shareholders are surely dancing in the C-suite today; they get to keep their live music monopoly intact with very few restraints on how it does business. Fans, artists and venues, meanwhile, get no relief. All that time, taxpayer money, and hope of a better music industry. Wasted.

It’s particularly shameful since the DOJ appeared to be comfortably winning at trial so far. The jury had already heard from a former Barclays Center executive about how Live Nation threatened to pull tours from the arena after it decided to ditch Ticketmaster in favor of a smaller rival. That’s the kind of testimony that speaks to the obvious need for breakup — how dangerous one company can be when it monopolizes ticketing, tours, artist management, and big venues. The clearest case for antitrust liability, that Live Nation leveraged one monopoly to prop up another and vice versa until it dominated the entire live music ecosystem, was already being made. It should have been a slam dunk of a case. All the government had to do was keep going.

Now here we are. What’s next is not super clear to me at the moment. There are dozens of states also prosecuting this, and as I wrote before, these state enforcers have the power to continue the monopoly case against Live Nation even after the feds duck out. Whether that will happen, and even can happen at this trial with this jury, remains to be seen. As always, we’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE: More than two dozen state enforcers, led by New York AG Letitia James, will continue prosecuting the case against Live Nation even without the feds, according to James’ office. The state AGs also complained about the settlement in court and suggested they would ask for a mistrial — which wouldn’t invalidate the settlement, but would reset proceedings for the states to take over.

Back in 2019, the Justice Department was faced with a dilemma. The most dire predictions of how the DOJ-approved live music mega-merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster would create an abusive, industry-spanning monopoly had come true. In the decade since the Department approved the merger, Live Nation had used its control of major artists and concert tours to force smaller venues into using Ticketmaster — a monopoly play pretty much everyone could see coming when the deal was first announced. The DOJ had clearly screwed up in allowing the merger to happen, and officials had to pick a path: Admit their mistake and break the company up, or throw a few new rules at the company and pretend like that would solve the company’s very structural monopoly problems.

Justice Department officials chose the latter, which predictably solved absolutely nothing. But the DOJ’s choice only delayed the inevitable. Five years later, faced with mounting evidence of the company’s constant wrongdoing, Jonathan Kanter and the Biden-era DOJ did what their predecessors wouldn’t and sued to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster and end the monopolist’s abuses for good.

Two years later, we’re finally headed to trial.

The core allegations are clear. The government claims — backed by an absolute pile of evidence — that Live Nation bullies venues it doesn’t own into using Ticketmaster by threatening to withhold money-making tours from artists and promotions it controls. Keep in mind here that Live Nation is the largest concert promoter and largest artist manager in America, which means they have enormous amounts of power when it comes to negotiations with venues. And second, the government says Live Nation forces the artists it manages to use its promotion service, an allegation so intuitive it feels like common sense. A jury will decide whether those tactics constitute monopoly crimes. If they do, it will ultimately be up to Judge Arun Subramanian of New York federal court to decide how best to stop Live Nation’s monopoly abuse.

The case before the jury is slightly smaller than what the Justice Department sought in its lawsuit. In deciding Live Nation’s request to end the litigation before it went to trial, Subramanian shrunk the government’s case against Live Nation while allowing the core monopoly claims to go to the jury. Live Nation tried to spike the football, so to speak, claiming in a blog post — which Live Nation quickly and hilariously retracted — that because of the ruling, break up is now out of the question, and suggesting the government should settle the case. Obviously a settlement hasn’t happened and at this point doesn’t appear likely. But also, and to be very clear, breakup remains the only actual solution to the Live Nation problem.

It doesn’t take the world’s most ardent antimonopolist to understand the problem with Live Nation’s multi-pronged monopoly. When one company wields monopoly control of artists, concert tours, venues and ticketing, the conflicts of interest and the potential to leverage one monopoly to boost the other are rampant. If you want Noah Kahan or Phish or Weird Al freaking Yankovic to play your venue, you’d better agree to use Ticketmaster to sell the tickets and Live Nation to promote the show, including paying all of the ancillary fees and taxes Live Nation wants to charge. If not, well, Live Nation has plenty of its own venues through which it can funnel its artists and tours. Independent venues get cut out of the monopolized live music ecosystem, at the expense of musicians, fans, and communities that value independence in its music scene. As the Department’s feckless 2019 consent decree showed, there’s no regulating our way out of this monopoly trap. Live Nation must be broken up.

It’ll be a month or so until the jury has a chance to decide Live Nation’s fate. But today is a major step towards undoing one of the country’s most obvious and predatory monopolies. We’ll keep you updated as we can.

In this episode of the Who Shall Rule podcast, co-host Danny Caine and I talk with ILSR’s own Stacy Mitchell and Lauren Gellatly about how the choices small business owners made on general strike day, and the choices they make running their businesses daily, are ultimately reflections of the wants and needs of the communities they serve. All of us have spent years thinking (and researching, writing, and advocating) about the crucial role small businesses play in our neighborhoods and our economy — Danny is a former small business owner himself. But beyond our jobs, we’re all a part of communities that small businesses make better, richer and more resilient. In our conversation, we reflect on the choices small businesses in our neighborhoods made on strike day, and how, in difficult times, small businesses and the sense of community and place they foster are more crucial than ever.

About our guests:

Stacy Mitchell is Co-Executive Director of ILSR and directs its Independent Business Initiative. Her reports and articles about monopoly power have shaped the thinking of policymakers, journalists, and advocates. As a strategist, she has helped build coalitions and win campaigns for policies that dismantle corporate power, level the playing field for independent businesses, and strengthen communities.

Lauren Gellatly is the Senior Advocacy & Campaigns Manager for ILSR’s Independent Business team where she brings her background in advocacy, economic development, and independent business support. Lauren executes campaign strategies and manages relationships with allied organizations and coalition partners, including a coalition of over 40 independent business groups and alliances — Small Business Rising — advocating for antimonopoly reforms.

This weekend we got the disappointing but possibly unsurprising news that the Justice Department is wavering on whether to continue its monopoly lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster. According to a report in Semafor, lobbyists and Live Nation execs have bypassed the department’s antitrust enforcers and are instead negotiating a possible settlement directly with senior DOJ officials. If this happens, it wouldn’t be the first time that companies and their paid help have attempted to kill much-needed antitrust action by skirting DOJ antitrust head Gail Slater and her team of enforcers and going straight to their more pro-monopoly superiors. According to the report:

“Tensions have been simmering for months between the Trump administration’s largely business-friendly accommodation and Slater’s more skeptical approach to corporate mergers. Her authority has been challenged in several high-profile cases, diminishing hopes in both progressive and populist MAGA circles for tough antitrust enforcement.”

Reports of the Trump administration settling the Live Nation lawsuit are not new, and, at least at the moment, the lawsuit is still headed for trial next month. But if the feds do waiver, it will be up to state-level law enforcers to carry on the fight against the most powerful live music company on earth. If that happens, it wouldn’t be the first time, nor the last, that the states were left to carry on when their federal antitrust partners bowed out.

We’ll dive into state antitrust power in a jiffy. But first, a couple thoughts: Regardless of what the Justice Department decides to do with the Live Nation lawsuit, it’s becoming clear that we’ll never truly know what kind of enforcer Slater might have been in a different administration. Slater has been at odds with top Justice Department brass for many months now, according to reports; in each case, she appears to take a principled, pro-enforcement stance on mergers and monopoly power, but corporate lobbyists have effectively sidelined her and her antitrust team and instead looked to their Justice Department buddies to greenlight their deals.

It’s been a year-long saga for Slater and the antitrust division. In January last year, Slater and the department sued to block a deal between Hewlett Packard Enterprises, or HPE, and a company called Jupiter Networks that would have married two of the three largest network service providers in the country. But by June, the government had settled its lawsuit and essentially allowed the companies to merge with few restrictions — a shocking turnaround for a merger that appeared dead on arrival. Soon after, reports surfaced that Slater had opposed the settlement but had been brushed aside by top department officials, who then fired two of Slater’s top deputies for insubordination for speaking out against the settlement. One name surfaced as a central figure in sidelining the antitrust team and getting the settlement done: HPE lobbyist Mike Davis, a longtime Trump world ally and former counsel to Chuck Grassley and the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was Davis, reports say, who convinced senior officials outside the antitrust division to settle the lawsuit and let the merger through, nevermind its obvious monopoly problem.

So, in the hopes that what worked for one monopolist might work for another, Live Nation has reportedly turned to Davis to try to end its Justice Department lawsuit before the case goes to trial. According to the Semafor report, Davis and former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway are lobbying for Live Nation, with Conway having met with Slater and other top officials to try to strike a settlement deal. Davis’ involvement for Live Nation isn’t breaking news; the Wall Street Journal reported last summer that Live Nation had hired Davis try to end the lawsuit. Roger Alford, one of the senior antitrust officials fired over his objections to the HPE/Juniper settlement, also warned that Live Nation was trying to use the HPE playbook to ward off antitrust. “Will the same senior DOJ officials ignore the President’s Executive Order just because Live Nation and Ticketmaster have paid a bevy of cozy MAGA friends to roam the halls of the Fifth Floor in defense of their monopoly abuses?” Alford said at a conference — referring, in this case, to a Trump executive order targeting ticket reselling.

What that settlement might look like, and whether Davis and his connected buddies succeed in swaying the Justice Department to end its lawsuit, is anyone’s guess. Those familiar with the antitrust division’s work on the case told me last summer that DOJ officials had floated possible settlement options, but that nothing seemed workable and certainly no deal was close to being finalized. After the Semafor report, it’s also unclear whether Slater and other antitrust officials decided against a settlement, so Davis and Conway are trying to once again sideline their concerns and to instead strike a deal with Justice Department higher-ups. That sounds plausible, given the context of the report, but we don’t know.

What we do know is that Live Nation and Ticketmaster are one of the most blatant and abusive monopolies in the country. The company’s abuses have been documented over and over, and the allegations in the DOJ’s lawsuit constitute straightforward monopoly crimes. If the Trump administration settles the lawsuit without breaking up the company, it will be a dereliction of their duty to enforce the law and a major loss for artists, independent venues, and music fans. But all will not be lost.

Along with the feds, 40 states and Washington, DC, are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit, and they are under no obligation to settle the case even if the feds do. As we’ve seen in other monopoly lawsuits where the feds and states are both plaintiffs (the late 1990s Microsoft monopolization case comes to mind), states can continue prosecuting antitrust lawsuits even if the federal government settles, and in doing so can secure important wins that go beyond the terms of the federal settlement. If the DOJ backs down and settles the Live Nation lawsuit, state enforcers could and should carry on prosecuting what seems like an imminently winnable and important case.

States leading on antitrust issues is nothing new. States passed the first antitrust laws back in the late 19th century, and states today are introducing and passing laws to make it harder for powerful companies to abuse consumers, workers, and small businesses. In the HPE case, states pushed the judge overseeing the merger settlement to expose the DOJ’s likely-corrupted process to scrutiny, which the judge agreed to do. Under our federalist system, state enforcement of our antitrust laws is crucial. If the feds settle the Live Nation case without breakup, it will be crucial once again.

The fight against Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s live music monopoly is happening everywhere, from city halls to federal courthouses. Last week, activists fighting for fairness in the industry took their fight to a hearing room inside the Russell office building catty corner to the Capitol and explained to the Senate Commerce Committee how Live Nation was making the industry’s ticket scalping problem worse.

Independent live music venues have been key voice in the battle against Live Nation’s dominance David Weingarden, a Colorado-based independent venue owner and the chair of the Colorado Independent Venue Association, whose dual roles have left him intimately familiar with the abuses of the Live Nation/Ticketmaster monopoly, and the predation of the secondary ticketing market, where ticket scalpers gobble up concert tickets to sell them to real fans at massive markups.

As a venue owner and advocate, Weingarden has experienced the panoply of Live Nation’s monopoly tactics: all-or-nothing tours in which Live Nation’s hundreds of managed artists tour only at Live Nation venues and use only Ticketmaster ticketing; the company’s anti-competitive “radius clauses,” in which Live Nation’s touring artists can’t perform at independent venues within a certain mile radius of their show at a Live Nation venue; Live Nation threatening independent venues that they’ll lose access to Live Nation artists if they don’t use Ticketmaster; and on and on.

“When you have one company that controls that much…they’re a behemoth, and it makes things very difficult for independent promoters,” Weingarden told the committee.

The secondary ticketing market piles one problem on top of another for venues and fans. Fans that don’t get ripped off by Ticketmaster often have the pleasure of getting doubly ripped off by Stubhub and the rest of the secondary ticket aftermarket — or conned into buying a speculative ticket that the scalper doesn’t actually own. For independent venues, they’re left holding the bag when a fan buys a fake ticket for seats that don’t exist or a show that isn’t actually happening. As Weingarden explained in testimony, these multi-billion dollar aftermarket ticketing sites rake in fees while many independent venues are scraping by, trying to keep the music industry afloat.

Ticketmaster’s obviously an outright monopolist in primary ticket sales for all kinds of events, from indie concerts to the literal Super Bowl. It controls at least 80 percent of the primary ticketing market — dominance like few other companies anywhere (it also controls more than 250 venues and manages more than 400 major artists, for those keeping track of the behemoths’ full ecosystem). But there’s too much money in the secondary scalper ticket market to keep Ticketmaster away. An FTC lawsuit from earlier this year detailed Ticketmaster’s shady dealings in the secondary market: While it purports to ban scalpers and queue-jumping bots, it secretly allows, and in some ways assists, scalpers to hawk thousands of event tickets. The ticket scalpers then sell those same tickets at steep markups on Ticketmaster’s platform, ripping off music and sports fans while allowing Ticketmaster to double-dip by charging another round of its outrageously-high fees. It’s a scam perpetuated by Ticketmaster’s near-stranglehold on the primary ticketing market and its outright refusal to stop scalpers.

Weingarden had company during the hearing. Alongside him was none other than Kid Rock himself, the 2000s country/rock superstar whose birth certificate reads Robert Ritchie. Ritchie has been a vocal supporter of ticketing reform for ages now, but his testimony to the Senate was particularly sharp and direct. He outlined the history of the Live Nation/Ticketmaster monopoly, including the companies’ promise that their 2009 merger would lead to lower prices and a better experience for artists. “Needless to say, that experiment has failed miserably,” Ritchie told the committee. “Independent venues have been crushed. Artists have lost leverage. Fans are paying more than ever and getting blamed for it.”

They were joined by Brian Berry from Ticket Policy Forum, an advocacy group that shills for Stubhub, SeatGeek and other secondary sites. Of course, Berry pushed the narrative that those ticket hawkers are actually doing fans a service and drove out shadier scalpers and counterfeiters. He also made clear that Live Nation and Ticketmaster are wrecking the live music ecosystem. Among other charges, he said that venues who drop Ticketmaster for another ticketing service lose access to five major Live Nation concerts a year on average, or around $1.5 million in revenue. “This vertical dominance means Live Nation/Ticketmaster is not merely a player - it is the rule maker, the gatekeeper, and the toll collector,” Berry told the committee.

Dan Wall, a senior executive from Live Nation, also testified. He said that, despite what everyone says, the live music industry is doing great and fans are getting great deals out there — and if they are unhappy with prices or access, they should blame the secondary market!

You can watch the full hearing here.

Weingarden, Ritchie, Berry and others at the hearing pointed to the possible solution: An ongoing Justice Department lawsuit aiming to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster to restore competition to the industry. At the moment, that case is in the hands of Judge Arun Subramanian, the Manhattan federal judge overseeing the case. Live Nation asked the court to toss the case ahead of its March trial date. We’ll keep an eye on it.

Monopolists have a long history of siting their most dangerous, polluting infrastructure in and around communities of color. We now know data centers are no different.

Research by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative confirmed what we’ve long suspected. Data centers are increasingly built nearby Black and Latino communities nationwide, polluting the air and putting these communities at far higher risk of dangerous health outcomes. This research adds to what we already know about data centers — that their massive energy needs raise nearby electric bills and drain community water.

According to the research, two trends are clear. First: Data centers are being sited and built disproportionately near communities of color. This is well documented. We’ve seen stories from state after state, where data center developers and their Big Tech backers push to build their server farms in Black or Latino communities, where they expect less resistance and less political power to stop them from building. One such project is a largest-of-its-kind data center campus planned for Colleton County, a majority-Black county in South Carolina. The massive project, larger than 1,000 football fields, landed in Colleton County only after a majority-White county in Georgia rejected the developer’s plan. Paul Black, an environmental activist fighting the data center project, told Capital B News that the data center follows a long pattern of racist zoning and siting of deeply-harmful industrial projects in communities of color. “All too often, these polluting industries and questionable zoning decisions land in Black and brown communities, places that are least empowered and have already carried the burden of past pollution,” Black told the news service.

The second trend is the harm data centers inflict on those communities of color. Data centers create multiple kinds of dangerous air pollution, in part because their backup generators run on diesel fuel. The EDGI research found that indicators of air pollution were much higher in communities of color near data centers, but lower for White communities. In researcher parlance: “In Census block groups within one mile of data centers, we found that the rank for percent people of color (POC) is positively associated with air pollution, namely PM2.5, NO2, and diesel PM, which are statistically significant at p<0.001.” The drastic harms data centers inflict on public health is staggering; according to research published by Cornell University, data centers could contribute to more than one-third of all asthma deaths by 2030; the picture of exactly which communities will shoulder that burden is now clear. Data centers are polluting Black and Latino communities nationwide, exacerbating already-racist industrial siting that has poisoned communities of color since forever.

That reality speaks to the importance of the local organizing work being done to resist data centers in communities of color. The Memphis Community Against Pollution has been fighting racist industrial siting for five years, and has made fighting against Elon Musk’s planned xAI data center and its ancillary methane gas turbines central to its work, alongside local activists Young Gifted & Green and Protect Our Aquifer. ILSR’s partners at Media Justice launched a major toolkit for organizers fighting data center projects in the South, where they have a disproportionate impact on communities of color. The fights against data centers are broad, effective and increasingly anti-racist.

Happy new year gang. I’m very thankful for the readers this still-very-new Substack has attracted in the short time I’ve been writing it. I’m excited to continue tracking resistance to corporate power in communities across the country — resistance that keeps growing by the day. Thanks for being here.

Subscribe now

***

I’ve been thinking a lot during this sad and disturbing week about the things that prop up and embolden a fascist state. We know of course, both from the industrial history of nazi Germany and from our current economy, that monopolies are key to making authoritarianism work and often serve as the industrial wing of fascism. I wrote about this back in 2019, a year so spiritually distant from today as to feel quaint in retrospect. But the picture was clear even then: If America is to descend into fascism, the state will require the acquiescence of, and often partnership with, corporate power.

Concentrated corporate power allows fascism to more easily exist and function because the interests of a fascist state and industrial monopolies are precisely aligned. The state needs corporations to do a lot of the nitty-gritty work required to carry out population control. The state requires a media willing to amplify and confirm its propaganda. It needs firms willing to produce the tools of surveillance and violence needed to control and imprison citizens. Meanwhile, monopolies are happy to use federal dollars to boost profits, so shareholders and executives keep quiet while they carry out the fascists’ agenda. When I say monopoly is the industrial wing of fascism, this is what I mean.

As antitrust scholar Daniel Crane (along with many, many others) have observed, a series of industrial monopolies and cartels propped up the Nazi regime in Germany. As Crane wrote in his 2020 paper Fascism and Monopoly, “the extreme concentration of market power during the Weimar period enabled Hitler to seize and consolidate totalitarian power through a variety of mechanisms.” The realization that monopolies helped Hitler carry out his agenda inspired a post-war dedication to antimonopoly policy at home. During a debate over strengthening American anti-merger policy, Rep. Emmanuel Celler, for whom the Celler-Kefauver anti-merger act of 1950 is named, pointed out that “monopolies…brought Hitler to power” and could do the same at home. This wasn’t a statement about Germany; it was a vision of a much darker possible future in America. If we don’t stop monopolization, concentrated economic power will lead to concentrated political power because they both want the same thing: to rule without question or opposition.

As monopoly capital regained its grip on the economy throughout the 1980s and 1990s, political leaders in both parties led us astray. Rather than fearing monopolies for their desire to concentrate wealth and power, we were told to embrace them with promises of convenience and cheap stuff to buy. Powerful corporations and the policymakers who supported them have made life significantly worse for many Americans — shuttering factories, crushing unions, moving company headquarters from the Heartland to coastal superstar cities, and making opening and running a small business increasingly unsustainable. The widespread anger at this fracturing of the American Dream pushed many voters toward Trump. Celler’s vision of an America in which an authoritarian rose in the wake of industrial monopolization came to fruition.

And here we are now, in which the fascist street violence happening in front of our eyes is emboldened and given cover by a handful of industrial, big tech and media monopolies. Would opposing these monopolies have stopped some ICE goon from killing Renee Good in Minneapolis? Of course not. But would a steadfast adherence to the political goals of antimonopoly over the past half-century have prevented the anger and desperation that allowed fascism to take power in America? I would argue yes, it would have, and as dark and bleak as things feel now, that understanding makes the importance of antimonopoly work clear today. Things are bad, but the fight is never over.

That’s really what’s at stake when we show up to oppose data centers, the privatized surveillance state of Amazon, the decimation of small businesses and community banks through monopoly tactics, and every other exploitative, extractive corporation. The more power and wealth we can strip away from corporate monopolies and redistribute to communities and working people, the weaker the fascist state becomes and the less likely it is to rekindle from its ashes in the future. To say that we have a world to win isn’t hyperbole. It’s very literally the stakes of our struggle against corporate control. But we’re here, and we’re fighting. Keep your heads up.

Earlier this year, Amazon’s plan to build a massive new fulfillment center in the sleepy Vermont town of Essex hit a hard-fought snag. The online retail and logistics monopoly wanted to erect a 100,000 square foot warehouse that would have been its first shipping and storage facility the state, and it had petitioned the town’s Development Review Board for approval — an often perfunctory step in the development process. Except, this time it wasn’t.

Amazon has made enemies across the economy, certainly including independent booksellers that Amazon’s tried to bury under its unceasing corporate bullying and monopoly power. No surprise, then, that Vermont’s own Phoenix Books and a longtime organizer and bookseller named Joanna Grossman led the effort to try to stop Amazon from gaining a foothold in Vermont.

Residents in Essex and beyond worried about the warehouses’ impact on nearby traffic and noise. But Grossman, Phoenix Books owner Mike DeSanto and many others also understood that welcoming Amazon to the state would mean welcoming a cutthroat monopolist that bullied small businesses, crushed union organizing efforts in its warehouses, and collaborated with ICE thugs. So after more than 100 local residents showed up to demand that the Board reject Amazon’s proposal, the town did just that after finding Amazon had not thoroughly studied the facility’s local impact and had cut corners with the state. Amazon has of course appealed, but Grossman’s organizing chops and the town’s refusal to let a notoriously abusive monopolist waltz into their state won the day.

In our latest episode of the Who Shall Rule podcast, we talk to Joanna about the fight against Amazon, and what communities can do to resist corporate power.

Subscribe now

Data centers have provoked ire in a lot of places around the country. Now that anger has found its way to the polls.

Last month, voters in Georgia and Virginia bucked a lot of political presumptions by voting for candidates who made affordability their calling card and clocked that data centers were seen as being primarily responsible for rising rates, among other harms. It’s no shock that votes went this way -- Virginia and Georgia have been overwhelmingly welcoming to data center projects -- but the results remain staggering. Voters in Georgia elected Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson, two Democrats, to positions on the state’s Public Service Commission, which regulates electricity in the states.

They were the first state-wide wins for Democrats in a non-federal race in nearly two decades, driven almost entirely by voter frustration at rising electricity bills and Republicans’ embrace of the data centers sapping the state’s power and control over its own resources. A New York Times story that dropped over the weekend asks a crucial question as we head into the 2026 midterm election season: Will the same anger that convinced lifelong Republicans vote for Democrats fuel a broad rejection of data center politics nationwide?

The Times story digs down into data centers, their impact on electricity prices and the way that’s played out in Georgia. I’ve written about a few data center fights, and the overall arch of the story remains true wherever resistance rises: People are already struggling to afford their lives, and the prospect of a data center showing up and getting an enthusiastic green light from local electeds just to raise their electricity bills drives people to city halls and, increasingly, to the polls to protest.

But again, this is not just about data centers! Vermonters have organized against an Amazon logistics hub, killing Amazon’s plans for now. In rural Arkansas, a typically mundane meeting between lawmakers and local farmers exploded into a 400-person revolt against the monopolization of agriculture. There is something much deeper happening in every corner of the country, and across communities that would typically have very different political affiliations and ideas. Some big, powerful corporation showing up in your community uninvited and strip mining it objectively sucks, and folks from all walks of life get it. Any party that cozies up to corporate power, in either words or deeds, risks the same fate as the Republicans on the Georgia Public Service Commission.

The community-led push to keep Live Nation, one the country’s most notorious monopolists, out of Portland, Maine this week landed in the hands of city officials. But will they listen to musicians and fans? Or the most powerful company in the history of music?

Last night, Portland city officials debated a proposed ordinance that, if enacted, would effectively kill Live Nation’s attempt to open a new, 3,300-person venue in the heart of the city’s downtown. Musicians, promoters and independent venue owners in the Maine Music Alliance have driven the grassroots uprising against the live music mega-monopolist’s proposed venue, and this new ordinance represents their best shot at killing the immediate venue proposal and continuing to question whether Live Nation deserves a place in the Portland music scene at all.

If you haven’t followed the saga of Live Nation’s proposed new venue in Portland (I wrote a bit about it here), here’s the background: Last winter, Live Nation and local developers announced plans to build a new mid-sized venue a block away from City Hall and right around the corner from Merrill Auditorium — an existing, major local venue. Indie venue owners and musicians inherently knew that opening a Live Nation venue in town would mean importing the monopolist’s notorious predatory practices along with it. Live Nation is the largest concert promoter, largest artist manager, largest event ticketing company and second-largest venue owner and operator in America. It wields its monopoly control over the live music ecosystem at the expense of local, independent venues, which get shut out of crucial tours and events, particularly those by artists whom Live Nation represents. If local venues lose concerts and close, that means local musicians have fewer places to perform, promoters have fewer venues to book, and the entire local music scene suffers. No city wants that.

So the Maine Music Alliance stepped up and organized a campaign to stop the proposed venue from being built. That organizing culminated in a contentious, hours-long meeting before City Council this summer. More than 100 folks filled council chambers, most of whom spoke out against the venue and the monopoly tactics Live Nation has used to dominate live music. The city ultimately voted to put the project on hold for six months while they sorted out what to do.

Now, city leaders are considering two options. The first option, proposed by two city council members, would tack a 1% fee on ticket sales at the venue that would, in part, go to support the local arts scene in various ways (the developers themselves offered to pay $1 per ticket to the city — typically more than 1% on gigs that size, but anyway). But a second plan, backed by the alliance and two other city councilors, would instead change land use rules in a way that would effectively kill the the Live Nation venue where it is currently planned.

At the moment, city rules ban venues from being less than 100 feet apart; city planners found that the proposed Live Nation venue would be a tick more than 100 feet from the front door of Merrill Auditorium, allowing it to be built downtown. But the new proposed ordinance would stretch that ban to 750 feet for venues with more than a 1,000 person capacity, while eliminating any distance restriction for smaller venues. That means Live Nation would have to look outside of downtown — or skip town altogether.

We’ll see what happens when the plans eventually reach the full City Council, where it sounds like the future of Live Nation in Portland will be decided. But dozens of folks in the Portland music scene, from venue owners to regular degular music fans, have been crystal clear about what Live Nation is: a cutthroat monopolist whose abuses have earned it a federal antitrust lawsuit and near-universal scorn from fans, artists, promoters and venue owners from coast to coast — a company that has no place in the city.

The city moratorium expires in March, although it sounds like some decision will come before then. I’ll keep you posted.

A day after New Yorkers elected Zohran Mamdani the next mayor of New York City by a landslide, Lina Khan stood at a lectern on a bright, crisp New York day and spoke about their shared vision for the city. Mamdani chose Khan, the former superstar Federal Trade Commission chair, to help lead his transition team after centering his campaign on promises to beat back the forces of corporate exploitation that have made the city unaffordable and in many ways unrecognizable to those who live there.

Now, here stood Khan, a visionary critic of corporate abuse and monopoly power, promising to foster a city in which “all workers and small businesses can thrive, and not just get by.”

With Khan by his side, we have arrived at Mamdani’s antimonopoly moment.

Share

This moment has been many months in the making. While Mamdani rarely if ever draped his campaign in the language of antimonopoly, the vision he spoke of on street corners, in the back seats of taxis, and in bodegas far and wide was steeped in antimonopoly — both as a prescription to cure what ails so many New Yorkers, and as a broad and exportable vision for a governance that puts democracy ahead of monopoly. The foundation of his campaign was built, as Khan echoed, on stripping away corporate control of the city and returning power to New York’s workers, tenants and small business owners. This is the essence of antimonopoly both as a set of policies and a philosophy for governance. In six weeks or so, when Mamdani is sworn in as the mayor of New York City, he will do so as the movement’s flag-bearer and as a model for leadership and governance for cities and states nationwide.

I think of the antimonopoly movement as a governing philosophy containing policies that, alone or in tandem, work to deconcentrate industries and break down pockets of outsized corporate power. Antitrust is a big part of this, of course. Antitrust enforcement stops monopoly abuses and prevents the further concentration of the economy. But organized labor fights monopoly as well by largely removing the ability for companies to use their size and power to exploit workers (this is particularly true of sectoral bargaining, in which workers organize and bargain across entire industries, rather than the shop-by-shop organizing that happens today). Tenant organizing transfers power from corporate slumlords to tenants, stripping away their incentive to buy more buildings to find more renters to exploit. Smart land use rules can stop dollar stores, data centers and other predatory businesses from entering and stripmining communities of their wealth and resources — opening the door to small businesses, manufacturing and other, more productive actors that local folks actually want.

Throughout his campaign, Mamdani’s policy planks have reflected this vision for a city largely free from the shackles of corporate control. His cornerstone policies — rent freezes, free bus transit, universal childcare, a $30 minimum wage, a ban on non-compete agreements, stronger protections for labor organizing — all return power to working folks and strip away the power corporations use to trap and exploit their employees. His small business platform speaks to the need to support local shops and stores in the face of corporate wealth and regulatory capture. His fight for a more affordable city is, in his own words, a fight against monopolists and those that empower and embolden them. “As Trump loosens consumer protections and empower CEOs, scammers, monopolies, and monopsony power, New York needs a mayor who will stand up to corporate greed and protect working-class dollars.” His plan to create a more affordable city is steeped in antimonopoly principles and policies.

As Mamdani knows, a broad antimonopoly vision of governance must also include some element of collective, public ownership of essential goods and services. His plan for city-owned grocers in New York is one way of addressing the acute problem of food access and affordability in the city. It’s a good solution that has had success elsewhere, but the larger fight against food deserts and high prices also requires strong antitrust law and enforcement to ensure independent grocers and bodegas can compete for shoppers without being bullied and exploited by the PepsiCos and Walmarts of the world.

So long as other antimonopoly forces are at work, public goods, like city-owned health clinics and social housing, offer crucial alternatives in often-monopolized industries. These publicly-owned goods and services exert important pressure on for-profit corporations, disciplining prices and giving the most vulnerable community members clear, affordable ways to meet their needs. Again, publicly-owned goods work best within an antimonopoly ecosystem that supports good jobs and wages, protects communities from exploitation, and deconcentrates industries by making the maintenance of monopoly power legally dangerous and untenable. Mamdani’s vision for New York, and for governance in general, seems to understand the need for this kind of ecosystem — one that puts people first, arrests corporate exploitation, and returns power to communities and the folks who live and work in them.

These coming weeks before Mamdani takes office will be filled with vision and hope for a more equitable New York, with far less corporate abuse and exploitation. But come January, he and his team will begin the very difficult work of reshaping the city in line with this vision of antimonopoly governance. The corporate knives will be out and bad actors in and outside of the Democratic Party abound. But Mamdani’s plan for New York is ultimately antimonopoly’s plan for the broader economy; his success there could mean the movement’s success far beyond the Five Boroughs.